Poughkeepsie Rock Station Glitch Forces DJs to go ‘Old School’

A major computer glitch brought a Poughkeepsie radio station to its knees on Monday during "morning drive time."

If you were listening to 101.5 WPDH this morning you might have heard something strange: old-school radio. A devastating computer glitch that was still unresolved as of 10am on Monday caused all of the station's audio files to become unplayable. That means that music, commercials, pre-recorded imaging elements and any other audio aside from the DJ's voices were completely gone from the computer.

As the Boris half of the Boris & Robyn Show, I had the unfortunate luck of discovering the issue just moments before going on live at 6am. Up until that moment everything was running as normal, but just as we were getting ready to turn on our microphones the screen froze and we were faced with dead air.

Luckily, Robyn and I have a combined 70 years or more of radio experience and remember broadcasting during the days of vinyl records and CDs. Even though it's been almost 25 years since we played a CD on the air, we still have a pretty large collection of albums that grace the back wall of our studio. Up until today, they were mostly there as decoration, but always standing at the ready 'just in case."

So, without even talking about it, Robyn and I immediately went back into old-school DJ mode, pulling albums and stacking them up next to the CD players so we could literally "jockey the discs" during the live broadcast. The result was probably not the most graceful four hours of morning radio, but it at least got the job done.

The good news for the listeners was that they got to hear some songs that rock radio hasn't played in a while (because many of the more popular CDs on our wall were stolen years ago by former employees) and, with the computer files all missing, it was a commercial-free four hours of morning radio.

According to the WPDH engineers, the issue is currently being addressed and they're hopeful that the system will be back up and running soon, but until then it continues to be old-school radio at its finest... or at least as good as we can do for now with what we've got.